What do you use to manage features and limits in your SaaS app?

Shem Leong
5 replies
Do you use an experimentation tool like LaunchDarkly and Optimizely to set up feature flags? Arguably, these are unsuitable for tracking limits. Sure, you could do a hack and slap on additional metadata onto the events. But you would still need to follow up with: tying your features and limits to your plans somewhere, periodically extracting the experiment data, aggregating the counts by user and writing custom code to gate your users. Or do you roll your own custom usage tracking and feature gating logic in your code? How do you keep things clean when you have a super complex pricing matrix? Or consistent across multiple projects / codebases? Disclaimer: I built Limiter, an open source platform for applying feature limits to your SaaS business. I'm mostly seeking feedback, low-key wishing for users.

Replies

Ray Hughes
We are releasing to the app stores 3x a week. We leverage the ENV file for features that are not production ready. For the most part our data is dynamically generated so having our own solution in place has been beneficial.
Shem Leong
@wiredays Thanks for sharing. Could I find out more about what you meant here by dynamically generated data (in your ENV file)?
Ray Hughes
@shem_l We store certain features in our ENV file. They are enabled / disabled by our build process. Our data comes from various sports games. Often there is less 30 seconds TTL before the data needs to be refreshed. Certain features depend on the state of that data so we toggle them on/off based on such. We are event driven if that helps clarify.
Shem Leong
@wiredays That's an interesting use-case, programatically configuring features. If you don't mind, I'll note it down as a potential feature for Limiter :)
Fabian Maume
I'm tracking usage manly from the database. Server-side analytics has the advantage of not being impacted by ad blockers.